“In our hands we hold the shadow of our hands,” begins a Yannis Ritsos poem. Prison camps, books burned, books banned, exiled to islands, deported, more house arrest, books banned again. When he was interred in a prison camp, “he would put the poems into tin cans and bury them around the compound.” Yannis Ritsos wrote the book-length poem “Epitaphios,” in just four days, at the age of twenty-seven, after seeing a photograph in the newspaper of a mother with the body of her son. The son was assassinated during the tobacco workers strike in Salonica. The poem was sold in record-breaking numbers, nearly 10,000 copies in just days. Then, the last 250 copies were burned in Athens, at the Temple of Olympian Zeus, along with books by Marx, etc.
“You’ve never thrived in isolation,” a friend of twenty-five years told me recently, as we walked around Brooklyn. But I chose it, and keep choosing it—the isolation of Vermont. Whatever constraints I’m working under, with, and within, it’s not the constraint of exile. A Broken Man in Flower, a recent collection of his poems written during exile, includes a letter Ritsos sent his publisher in April of 1969 from house arrest on Sanos: “I want to impose some order: to speak slowly, carefully…I get the impression it’s no longer I who am speaking, that it’s just not me.” In a poem, “every single word is an exodus / for a meeting, canceled many times, / it is a true word when it insists on the meeting.” Back to the letter in A Broken Man in Flower: “The only thing that forms in my mouth is: choking, choking, choking, choking. And again: choking, choking. But at long last I must speak.”
-Morgan English